The Chronicle of Higher Education just published its “Top Research Universities Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index” for 2007, and UCSB’s Department of Geography wound up as # 2 in the nation – after not being ranked at all in 2006! UCSB also ranked # 1 in Oceanography/Physical Sciences, # 2 in Biomedical Engineering, # 3 in Marine Sciences, # 3 in Theater Literature, # 4 in Materials Science and Engineering, and in the top 10 in Ecology, Computer Engineering, Media Studies, Italian, and Physics (complete details at =551&year=2007). While UCLA’s Department of Geography was ranked #1 (2.02 on the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, compared to our 1.54), we outscored UCLA in 4 of the 11 statistical categories – and some feel that the inclusion of 10 affiliated faculty to the total number of the active Geography faculty may have adversely affected the percentages of our performance statistics.
People seem to love rankings in all fields of human endeavor, and university and college rankings are no exception. Indeed, the annual “
America
’s Best Colleges” issue of U.S. News & World Report sells nearly twice as many copies as other issues of the magazine. However, ranking methodologies are as varied as the statistical weights of the criteria used – the National Opinion Research Center’s methodology review stated that the weights used by U.S. News “lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis,” and some critics have charged that U.S. News intentionally changes its methodology every year so that the rankings change and they can sell more magazines (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_rankings for more about this thorny subject). The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index is also controversial, but it has been generally welcomed for its objectivity. Either way, kudos to UCSB and, in particular, to its Department of Geography!
